Federal Donuts Plans National Expansion

Hankering for some of the best donuts, coffee, and chicken in the country, but you happen to live outside of the City of Brotherly Love? Have no worries or hunger pains, my friends. Salvation is coming (to some of you, anyway).

Federal Donuts is planning a national expansion. Are they coming to your town? (Nick Solares/Eater.com)

Federal Donuts is the beloved chicken-and-donuts chain that was founded in 2011 by acclaimed chef and 2014 Eater Chef of the Year Michael Solomonov with his Zahav restaurant partner Steve Cook, local coffee shop owners Tom Henneman and Bobby Logue, and Philly food maven Felicia D’Ambrosio. The chain quickly was dubbed “FedNuts” by aficionados, and the five Philadelphia locations boasted long lines of customers waiting patiently for their deep-fried helping of heavenly junk food.

Federal Donuts adheres to the old adage about taking the one thing that you do and doing it extremely well. The menu consists solely of variations on donuts, fried chicken, and coffee. The chicken is double-battered, Korean-style, so that the skin is exceedingly crisp. You can choose from a variety of glazes, rubs, and dry spices to add to your chicken. Each serving comes with a honey donut, allowing you to swap between sweet and savory to your heart’s content. As for the donuts, they are exclusively cake donuts, with almost all flavors incorporating “baharat, a Middle Eastern blend of aromatics, typically including allspice and clove.” The combo, says Eater, “is more chicken and biscuits than chicken and waffles.”

FedNuts has long admitted to scouting locations within drivable distance to Philadelphia, but its first expansion locations will be quite a bit further away: Nashville and Miami!

Eater laid out a list of why the time was ripe for a Federal Donuts expansion. First of all, there is the fact that all fast-casual regional concepts are looking to become the newest Shake Shack, the epitome of “scalable concepts that might some day make them rich and also extend their culinary reach to markets and customers otherwise untapped.” Also, chicken is cheaper than beef and the fast-casual market hasn’t really capitalized on that, with teh exception of Chik-Fil-A, Popeye’s, and KFC. In other words, the time is ripe for some FedNuts and I personally couldn’t be more excited.